Contrary to some reports, we did contact Midtown Comics. In fact, one of our staffers went to the store in person and spoke to book buyer David Webster, who said that we should simply pull whatever data we wanted from the “top sellers” chart that the store puts on its website. That is precisely what we did. … We regret that we did not note this distinction in print, and plan to publish a clarification in our Jan. 26 issue, due on newsstands Jan. 19.

Looking at that cover makes me curious. Van Lente and Foley are writers. Lima is the penciler. I have no idea who Calero is, since he isn’t listed on the creators page (link no longer available). And Rosenberg is credited under “created by”. He’s the head of the Platinum, and his bio is twice as long as anyone else’s on the project, just for coming up with the idea.

As a last note, if you Google “Platinum Cowboys Aliens”, the front page results at this writing look like this:

A post at Heidi’s blog talking about Dave Lewis’ original rant

The webcomic at DrunkDuck.com (a Platinum company)

A really cool article about what the giveaways and publication mean for webcomics

Dave Lewis’ original rant

Art clips from the comic at Platinum’s mobile content site

A puff piece at Comics2Film about Platinum’s plans to make a movie based on the concept

It’s lucky that the comic places on the front page at all, but Platinum shouldn’t be happy that three of the six (I’ve eliminated duplicate and same-site links) results call into question their business model.